Research Interests

I am currently working on the "growing up"- porject. One major goal of the “growing up” project is to compare developmental changes in bonobos and chimpanzees, to identify similarities and differences during their ontogeny, and relate this to corresponding information from modern humans. Choosing physiological markers (steroids like testosterone and DHEA, thyroid homrones, neopterin, klotho and IGFBP-3) and somatic traits (forearm length measures) that are representative for somatic growth, reproduction, and maintenance, supports the second major goal, to construct life history (LH) profiles of the two ape species. Adding published data from modern humans facilitates the third goal, the detection of LH traits of the last common ancestor of hominoid and hominid primates. The “growing up” project contributes to the existing information: Firstly, it is the first comparative study on the development of bonobos and chimpanzees that is based on a large data set from living individuals that can be transposed from cross-sectional into longitudinal analyses. Second, it includes multiple physiological markers, and combines these measures with data on somatic growth. Third, it includes extensive validation of physiological markers that had not yet been explored in nonhuman primates, or that had been measured in matrices that require invasive sampling. With these non-invasive methods, the project paves the way for elaborate studies of development and LH of apes living in natural environments.